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Home Defibrillators Can Save Lives

Posting Date: 08/16/2004

If you watch medical dramas on TV, the chances are good that you have seen a crisis like this: A patient goes into cardiac arrest, someone yells ?code blue? and doctors come rushing with a crash cart and defibrillator. Someone applies paddles to the patient?s chest, shouts ?clear? and jolts the patient with electricity. The patient arches off the table and, with luck, is brought back from the brink of death.

Until fairly recently such high-tech emergency rescues were limited to hospitals, big clinics and ambulances. That?s because a medical team was needed to diagnose the heart rhythm abnormality and use the sophisticated equipment. Defibrillators were cumbersome and expensive.

All that has changed. In the past several years, defibrillators have been installed in public areas such as schools, police stations, health clubs and airports. The people using a defibrillator to restore normal heart rhythm in places like these usually have had no medical training.

Nonetheless, the results are excellent, with more than half of the victims surviving at least a year with good brain function. Traditional CPR, which requires training, results in a much lower rate of survival, around 5 percent.

Since 2003, patients at high risk have been able to ask their doctors to prescribe a home defibrillator. ?HeartStart? is made by Philips Electronics and costs about $2,000. It is the size of a textbook and is designed so that almost anyone can use it.

People can read or listen to simple instructions that tell them how to place the paddles on the victim?s chest. If the machine detects a normal heart rhythm, it will not shock the patient. If it detects a life-threatening arrhythmia, on the other hand, it jolts the heart in an attempt to restore normal rhythm.

Now Philips would like to be allowed to sell HeartStart without a prescription. This is just the latest and most sophisticated step in medical device marketing.